A LIFE OFLEARNING

Yi-Fu Tuan

Charles Homer HaskinsLecture for 1998

American Council of Learned Societies

ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No. 42

ISSN 1041-536X

Copyright © 1998Yi-Fu Tuan

A LIFE OFLEARNING

Yi-Fu Tuan

Charles Homer HaskinsLecture for 1998

American Council of Learned Societies

ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No. 42

The Charles Homer Haskins Lecture

Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), for whom the ACLS lectureseries is named, was the first Chairman of the American Council ofLearned Societies, from 1920 to 1926. He began his teaching careerat the Johns Hopkins University, where he received the B.A. degreein 1887, and the Ph.D. in 1890. He later taught at the University ofWisconsin and at Harvard, where he was Henry Charles LeaProfessor of Medieval History at the time of his retirement in 1931,and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1908to 1924. He served as president of the American Historical Associa-tion in 1922, and was a founder and the second president of theMedieval Academy of America in 1926.

A great American teacher, Charles Homer Haskins also did muchto establish the reputation of American scholarship abroad. Hisdistinction was recognized in honorary degrees from Strasbourg,Padua, Manchester, Paris, Louvain, Caen, Harvard, Wisconsin, andAllegheny College, where in 1883 he had begun his highereducation at the age of thirteen.

Previous Haskins Lecturers

1983 Maynard Mack1984 Mary Rosamond Haas1985 Lawrence Stone1986 Milton V. Anastos1987 Carl E. Schorske1988 John Hope Franklin1989 Judith N. Shklar1990 Paul Oskar Kristeller1991 Milton Babbit1992 Donald W. Meinig1993 Annemarie Schimmel1994 Robert K. Merton1995 Phyllis Pray Bober1996 Robert William Fogel1997 Natalie Zemon Davis

Contents

Brief Biography v-vi

Introduction vii-ixby John H. D'Arms

A Life of Learning 1-16by Yi-Fu Tuan

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Brief Biography

Yi-Fu Tuan was born in China in 1930 and was educated in Australia,the Philippines, England, and the United States. He holds degreesfrom the University of Oxford (B.A., 1951; M.A., 1955) and theUniversity of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1957). He has taught atIndiana University, the University of New Mexico, the University ofToronto, and the University of Minnesota. In 1984 he becameProfessor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,where, since 1985, he has been the J.K. Wright Professor and VilasResearch Professor.

Professor Tuan was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1968-1969. In 1973he received an Award for Meritorious Contribution to Geographyfrom the Association of American Geographers. He was elected aFellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciencein 1986. In 1992 Professor Tuan was elected "Best Professor" by theWisconsin Student Association and also received a Certificate ofAppreciation for "Special Contributions to Student Lives" from theInterfraternity Council and the Panhellenic Association of theUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison. The Interfraternity Council alsopresented him with a Professor Appreciation Award for Excellencein Teaching in 1994.

Professor Tuan has delivered the following endowed publiclectures: Morrison Lecture, Australia National University (1975);Matthew Vassar Lecture, Vassar College (1976); Special UniversityLecture, University of London (1980); R. J. Russell Memorial Lecture,Louisiana State University (1982); Alcan Lecture on Architecture,Vancouver, British Columbia (1998); McMartin Memorial Lecture,Carleton University, Canada (1985); Research Lectures, NationalTaiwan University (1988); Hooker Lecture, McMaster University(1992); Landsdowne Lecture, University of Victoria (1994); CarlSauer Memorial Lecture, University of California, Berkeley (1996);and the Alexander von Humboldt Lecture, University of California,Los Angeles (1997).

His books include Pediments in Southeastern Arizona (1959),The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God (1968), Topophilia(1974), Space and Place (1977), Dominance and Affection (1984),The Good Life (1986), Passing Strange and Wonderful (1993),Cosmos and Hearth (1996), and Escapism (forthcoming, October1998).

Professor Tuan has also served as Delegate to the AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies from the Association of AmericanGeographers.

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Introduction

I am delighted to welcome you all-Delegates, Presidents, andAdministrative Officers of Learned Societies; representatives fromour college and university Associates; ACLS Fellows; and distin-guished guests and friends-to the Charles Homer HaskinsLecture, and to introduce Professor Yi-Fu Tuan. The HaskinsLecture is in many ways the high point of the year at ACLS, aspecial blend of celebration and scholarly substance. The title ofthis Lecture Series, "A Life of Learning," is a splendid reminderthat while our Council is composed of "Learned Societies," we infact see ourselves as "Learning Societies." For the imperatives, theexcitement, and the pleasures of scholarship lie in the process,in ongoing investigation and discovery.

When John William Ward became President of the ACLS in1982, he sought to give tangible expression to the ACLS commit-ment to these values by establishing an annual lecture. Each yearsince, we have asked the lecturer:

... to reflect on the lifetime of your work as ascholar, on the motives, the chance determina-tions, the satisfactions (and the dissatisfactions)of the life of learning, to explore through yourown life the larger, institutional life of scholar-ship. We do not expect you to present theproducts of your own scholarly research, butrather to share with other scholars the personalprocess of a particular lifetime of learning.

This lecture is the sixteenth in this series, which is named forCharles Homer Haskins, the first chairman of ACLS. The Execu-tive Committee of the Delegates of ACLS has the seriousresponsibility of nominating each year's Haskins lecturer. Afterintensive deliberations, the committee fixed firmly and enthusi-astically on Professor Tuan, as a scholar whose many accomplish-ments over a distinguished career tangibly express the values forwhich the lectureship stands. In their discussion, the Delegatesmay not have been aware that Haskins, a distinguished medieval-ist, began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin,where Professor Tuan has earned the admiration and affection ofhis students and his colleagues. So it is especially appropriate toadd the Haskins Lectureship to Professor Tuan's many honors.

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You have seen a biographical sketch of Professor Tuan, so Iwon't now recapitulate his achievements-the sorts of things thatthe economist Albert Hirschman has referred to as "obituary-enhancing activities." I do note, with pride, that he has been aDelegate to the ACLS from the Association of American Geogra-phers. The titles of his major works-Space and Place: ThePerspective of Experience; Landscapes and Fear; The Good Life;Passing Strange and Wonderful; and Cosmos and Hearth-offera sense of how this human geographer invites the reader into newand varied intellectual landscapes, made vivid by his broaderudition, disciplined thinking, playful imagination, and moralconviction. I quote a passage from Cosmos and Hearth that, forme, expresses precisely (and helps to resolve) tensions betweenthe life of action and the life of thought:

Singing together, working together against tan-gible adversaries, melds us into one whole: webecome members of the community, embeddedin place. By contrast, thinking-especially think-ing of the reflective, ironic, quizzical mode,which is a luxury of affluent societies-threatensto isolate us from our immediate group andhome. As vulnerable beings who yearn at timesfor total immersion, to sing in unison . . . withothers of our kind, this sense of isolation-ofbeing a unique individual-can be felt as a deeploss. Thinking, however, yields a twofold gain:[first,] although it isolates us from our immediategroup, it can link us both seriously and playfullyto the cosmos-to strangers in other places andtimes; and [second,] it enables us to accept ahuman condition that we have always beentempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, theimpermanence of our state wherever we are, ourultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one whoconsiders the gain greater than the loss.

At the University of Wisconsin, Professor Tuan engages in aliterary genre that is highly unusual today. He publishes a briefnewsletter that begins, "Dear Colleague," and ends, "Best wishes,Yi-Fu." In this newsletter he muses on some topic that has caughthis attention-but the musings always contain one core thought, orpoint, or moral. By one count there have been more than 150 ofthese missives. He calls them, disparagingly, "a sort of light relieffrom the usual type of campus memo," and in fact they are that, but

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they are also much, much more. They form a series of lively andengaging meditations on friendship, aging, the element of chancein human affairs, and comparative culture. I know from friends inMadison that Professor Tuan's Wisconsin colleagues eagerly awaiteach issue of his newsletter, just as we eagerly awaited his lectureon the evening of May 1, 1998.

Professor Tuan's lecture was one of the highlights of the 1998Annual Meeting. He presented a splendid picture of the twentiethcentury cosmopolite, speaking in the American PhilosophicalSociety's Benjamin Franklin Hall beneath portraits of his predeces-sors in global thinking, Franklin, George Washington, and ThomasJefferson. The evening concluded with a buffet supper reception inProfessor Tuan's honor.

- John H. D'Arms, PresidentAmerican Council of Learned Societies

ix

A Life of Learningby

Yi-Fu Tuan

The invitation from the American Council of Learned Societies togive the Haskins Lecture came to me as a great and pleasant surprise.All honor should seem undeserved-should be a surprise-but thisone far exceeds my normal chart of hopes and aspirations. Amonggeographers, I believe only Don Meinig of Syracuse University hasgiven the Haskins Lecture. The honor to him is as well-earned as itis predictable, for Don is not only a distinguished scholar andhumanist; he is also one who labors in an established field-thehistory and historical geography of the United States-that is itselfdistinguished and honored, in that many of the country's best mindsand scholars have chosen to cultivate it. My own area of study isquite different. It is off-center even in geography. Students who takeit up tend to be regarded as impractical loners with uncertain jobprospects after graduation. True, I now enjoy a modicum ofrecognition in geography, but it is more a consequence of mylongevity-my long-time card-carrying membership in the profes-sion-than of any marked intellectual influence. And so I return tomy surprise and pleasure at the invitation from the Council, avenerable institution with a superb record of support for the highroads of learning, which this year chooses, boldly if not wisely, toacknowledge a maverick.

What is it then that I do? My answer is human geography; moreprecisely, a sub-field within human geography that might be called(albeit inelegantly) systematic humanistic geography. And what isthat? I will try to provide an answer, drawing on my own experienceand work. A good way to start is to envisage a faculty socialgathering. At such a gathering, a historian is unlikely to be asked,"Why are you a historian?" Yet I have been asked repeatedly, "Why

are you a geographer, or why do you call yourself one?" Myunimposing physical appearance may have prompted the question,for people even now tend to see the geographer as a robust explorerin the mold of Robert Falcon Scott or Indiana Jones. As a matter offact, when I was an undergraduate, the professors of geography atboth Oxford and Cambridge were explorers. The question "Why doyou call yourself a geographer?" may also have been prompted bythe titles I have given to some of my books. People don'timmediately understand how Morality and Imagination, PassingStrange and Wonderful, Cosmos and Hearth, and Escapism can bethe works of a geographer.

To those who have wondered about my vocation, I respond inthree ways, each geared to a different level of seriousness. At a socialgathering, when people are not at their most attentive, I am likelyto say, "As a child, I moved around a great deal with my family, andthere is nothing like travel to stimulate one's appetite for geogra-phy." Sad to say, this lazy answer nearly always satisfies my inquirer.It is what he or she expects. My second and more thoughtfulresponse is: I have always had an inordinate fear of losing my way.Of course, no one likes to be lost, but my dread of it is excessive.I suspect that more than physical discomfort is at stake. To be lostis to be paralyzed, there being no reason to move one way ratherthan another. Even back and front cease to be meaningful. Life, withno sense of direction, is drained of purpose. So, even as a child, Iconcluded that I had to be a geographer so as to ensure that I shouldnever be disoriented. Geographers always know where they are,don't they? They always have a map somewhere--either in theirbackpack or in their head.

A childhood hero of mine was Sherlock Holmes. I admired himand considered him a superb geographer because he could alwaysfind his way, whether in the back streets of London and Chicago,or in the wilds of Utah and Tibet. Moreover, Holmes was alwayssocially at ease: he knew how to behave whether the venue was aduchess's drawing room, a Mormon meeting hall, or an opium den.That, too, I found most admirable for, like many young people, Ifeared social disorientation quite as much as I did the geographicalkind. This fear of losing my way has strongly affected my environ-mental preferences. Unlike many people, I prefer American towns

with their geometric street patterns to Old World towns with theirmaze of narrow alleys. Old World towns are unfriendly to strangers,who must stay a long time to feel spatially comfortable. By contrast,the open grid characteristic of many American towns says rightaway, "Welcome, stranger." I dislike the tropical rainforest for thesame reason: unless one is a native, it invites disorientation. I likethe desert because it is an open map, with the sun serving as adependable marker of east and west, and with sharply-etchedlandforms-visible from miles away-that unmistakably tell thevisitor where he or she is.

But my dread of rainforest and love of desert hint at somethingdeeper than just orientation. Underneath such likes and dislikes arequestions of one's fundamental attitude toward life and death. In therainforest, all I can see and smell-perversely, I admit-is decay. Inthe desert, by contrast, I see not lifelessness but purity. I sometimessay teasingly to environmentalists that, unlike them, I am a genuinelover of nature. But by "nature" I mean the planet earth, not just itsveneer of life-and the whole universe, which is overwhelminglyinorganic.

This leads to my most serious reply to the question, "Why are youa geographer?" I took up geography because I have alwayswondered, perhaps to a neurotic degree, about the meaning ofexistence: I want to know what we are doing here, what we wantout of life. Big questions of this kind, which occur to most childrenas they approach puberty, have never left me. But rather than seekan answer in the great abstractions of philosophy and religion, Ibegan my quest at the down-to-earth level of how people make aliving in different places and environments. This, to me, was and isthe substantive core of human geography. Still, I could never besatisfied with learning about the economics and politics of survivalalone. The very word "survival," which appears rather often inecological literature, seems to me unduly restrictive and harsh. Itevokes images of nature "red in tooth and claw," of peopleconstantly fighting and struggling, climbing the ladder of well-beingonly to fall down again. Its message to me is that people can do littlemore than cope. Perhaps that summarizes the human story, as itdoes the animal story. But I am not altogether convinced. My almostpathological need to find meaning presses me to ask, again andagain, "What else is there? What goes beyond-even far beyond-coping and survival, the vocabulary of nature and of ecologicalstudies?"

I went to Oxford as an undergraduate believing that it offered thebest program in human geography. Not so. Geography at Oxfordafter the Second World War was in the doldrums. Its humangeography lacked all inspiration. The only part of the curriculumthat gave me any intellectual sustenance was geomorphology-thestudy of landforms. So I specialized in geomorphology. At Oxford,I came across a paper by a California geographer, John Kesseli,called "The Concept of the Graded River." I liked it: it satisfied mydesire for clear reasoning, for the grounding of arguments onevidence that can be seen and touched. In 1951, I went to theUniversity of California at Berkeley to study geomorphology withKesseli and human geography with Carl Sauer. My graduate studentyears there were exceptionally happy and productive. Although Ispent most of my time working on a geomorphological dissertation,my intellectual engagement with the intangibles of human existencenever weakened. I read much else besides technical papers andbooks on geography. A cousin of mine, who was then a professorof mathematics at the University of Washington, visited me inBerkeley and found a copy of R. G. Collingwood's Idea of Historyand several works on existentialism on my desk. He smiled in aworldly-wise way and said, "You will outgrow it."

Well, I never did. I couldn't jettison the metaphysical questioningsof childhood. I continued to tussle with, What does it mean to liveon this watery planet called earth? Are we determined by ourenvironment, including its physical elements, or are we free? If wepossess even a small degree of freedom, what have we done withit? All human beings surely want the good life. But what is it? Canone properly and fruitfully speak of the good life in the singular-that is, as a goal toward which humankind as a whole might aspire,or is the good life inevitably relative, a vast array of barely compatiblegoals dictated by the accidents of taste?

These questions, even when grounded in the tangible facts ofgeography, remain hard to grapple with. How will I ever find thetime to study them? By happy chance, my first tenure-track positionwas at the University of New Mexico. In the early sixties, NewMexico was a small university located in a modest-sized town thatlay in the midst of broad expanses of shrub and desert. Theuniversity's geography department was so small that, by hiring me,it doubled its size. We two geographers carried a horrendousteaching load, but felt little pressure to publish. This lack of pressure

to publish meant that I had the time and, more important, peace ofmind to shift my commitment back to human geography. But Ineeded more than time and peace of mind. I also neededencouragement and stimulation. These I received from my onegeography colleague--a learned man who was also a kindredspirit-and from J. B. Jackson, who lived in Santa Fe and was thefounding editor of a magazine called Landscape. Under hiseditorship, this magazine dealt as much with philosophy as withgeography; many of its articles moved far beyond descriptions ofparticular landscapes to seminal reflections on culture and humannature. I lived, then, in a New Mexico oasis, a setting that in itsisolation is close to the ideal of a lighthouse on an inaccessible coastrecommended by Einstein for the serious postdoctoral student. Thedesert itself provided me with discipline and inspiration. Itsharshness scotched my natural love of ease; its pure lines cleansedmy mind of rank growths.

In 1969, thirty-eight years old, I felt that, at last, I knew enough oflife and of the world to engage seriously with systematic humanisticgeography. I was then a full professor at the University of Minnesota.With that status achieved, I convinced myself that I had no wish forgreater worldly success. My ambition, which remained a powerfuldrive, could henceforth be directed without distraction on intellec-tual tasks, including ones that might seem foolish. "Ambition" is not,however, quite the right word, for it suggests too much the limelight.I never sought out the limelight. As a child, I had no interest inbecoming President or a famous scholar. As an adult, I found absurdthe idea that I should struggle to increase the length of my obituaryby another half inch. On the other hand, ever since I had enteredOxford I had worked hard; moreover, all my life I have lived in andloved the campus atmosphere of work. My sense of well-being wasnourished and continues to be nourished by an awareness ofstudents swarming just beyond my field of vision, and on the humof activity in classrooms and libraries that portends high purposeand worthy goals. Official days of rest-weekends and nationalholidays-were and still are unwelcome. I need my daily dose ofmental stimulation. Each day I require the reassurance of havingtaken a step forward in my own enlightenment; I have simplyassumed that this is true of most people in a university community.

By the time I arrived in Minnesota, I was a driven man--drivenultimately by the big and "woozy" questions that had startedhaunting me as a child. They took on an extra edge in youngadulthood. My great good fortune was that the Oxford of myundergraduate years made them seem respectable, even fashion-able. In the aftermath of a horrible war, the university welcomedstudents and teachers of a philosophical, theological, or literarybent, willing to address the timeless puzzles of life. If I showedexceptional diligence as an undergraduate, it was because thisdeeply-rooted personal need found satisfaction and stimulation inthe books, lectures, and, above all, endless late-night talks that werea part of the university's ambience.

There was another reason. At Oxford, my eyes were opened tothe richness and sheer fascination of human reality. Like mostpeople, I felt the world's magic as a child, but had lost this sense ofmagic in middle school's unholy mix of regimented work andrelentless competition. At Oxford, I regained it. I was drawn towonder not only at the glories and miseries of human existence,observable on the streets as well as in colleges, but also at thecommon routines of cooking and washing, planting and harvesting,buying and selling, the flowing and ebbing of traffic in city streets,the raising and tearing down of houses, the perambulations of men,women, and children-these and the other pulsations of life thatmake up the content of human geography. They are thoroughlyworthy of study. It is sad for me to say that geographers have all toooften made them seem rather pedestrian. The challenge to thehumanist geographer is to see afresh these ordinary objects andmotions of life, to take delight in them for what they are, as theyappear, then to dive under for hidden relations and meanings, and,finally, to present both-surfaces and depths, the seen and theunseen-in a language that is subtle yet vigorous.

With the onset of middle age, my drive to learn could easily havelost momentum, turned into studious habit or chores dutifullyperformed, if I thought that I was merely consuming the world'sstock of knowledge and wisdom-that is, observing reality throughwhat others had said and written. I needed to feel that I hadsomething to add, not so much in factual details as in frameworksand perspectives, which, by permitting facts and ideas to interact innew and fruitful ways, could subtly reshape our understanding ofthe world. An ambitious goal, indeed. I worked hard toward it in the

various places I taught between 1956 and 1968-Indiana, NewMexico, and Toronto-but it was only at Minnesota that I came closeto touching the hem of success.

Yet, in 1983, I left Minnesota for Wisconsin. Why? I have oftenwondered myself. I was happy at Minnesota and expected to staythere till my three score years and ten ran their course. Perhaps it wasthe awareness that a late middle-age crisis lurked down the road, orthat I needed a change that would give me a final surge of energy.Wisconsin's faculty was as distinguished as Minnesota's, but younger.I could draw on their youth and vitality. I would be the oldestmember there, itself a pleasing thought to someone of Asiandescent. So, after fourteen good years at Minnesota, I moved toWisconsin, where I spent another fourteen good years. The latemiddle-age crisis I vaguely anticipated did break while I was tryingto settle down in my new academic home. Fortunately, it was brief.I managed to overcome depression-a sense that I had studied lifebut had not lived it-with the help of understanding colleagues andfriends.

Let me now turn to my small successes. They are so in my owneyes rather than the world's, although Topophilia might be countedan exception. This book, which is a systematic study of how peoplecome to be attached to place, was published in 1974, at a time whenthe environmental movement needed a work in the tradition ofhumane letters to complement the flood of publications pouring outof the factories of applied science. Topophilia's popularity may begauged by the fact that at one college bookstore, it was put on a shelflabeled "Astrology and Occult." To my surprise, late-bloomingFlower Children found it sympathetic, as did their bible The WholeEarth Catalog. Topophilia's romance with Counter Culture was,however, brief, and would have been even briefer had CounterCulture not dovetailed into the environmental movement. The bookeventually achieved the respectability of a required text for collegecourses in landscape architecture. More important than marketplacesuccess in motivating me to persevere, despite many dead ends andfailures, was the occasional psychological reward-success in thesense of an unexpected shift in my pattern of thought. I shallillustrate what I mean with two books that I published in the 1980s.

The first is Segmented Worlds and Self Group Life and IndividualConsciousness. I was led to write this book because humanemotional and mental make-up has consistently been my point ofdeparture. Humanistic geography is the geography of people and,of course, people have feelings, language, and ideas. So topophiliais the love of place, just as topophobia is the fear of place, a themeI took up in a book called Landscapes of Fear. Love and fear arebasic human emotions transformed to varying degrees by imagina-tion and culture. Having touched base with these emotions, I thensought to explore a unique quality of human consciousness-self-consciousness. How is it related to the development of individualityand the need for privacy? How would an individual's growing senseof self affect social cohesion and group life? It is a topic of predictableappeal to the human geographer, for a heightening of self-consciousness and individuality clearly evolved with the progres-sive partitioning of space. Partitioned space promotes privacy byallowing individuals to be alone, engage in separate activities, haveseparate thoughts, or explore each other's world in sustainedconversation. My plan was to refurbish and extend my knowledgeof the European house from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenthcentury, concentrate on the number and arrangement of rooms, thepurposes they served, and correlate these changes in spatialorganization with the history of consciousness.

It seemed a worthwhile project. Yet after a year of two of readingand writing I grew discouraged. I could see a decade of hard workahead, in the course of which I would be wiser in details but notnecessarily in understanding, for my arc of vision would have stayedessentially the same. I minded the meagerness of the intellectualrecompense because I am so far from being the "utmost scholar,"caricatured by George Steiner as someone who can happily spenda lifetime studying Korean chamber pots of the ninth century andlittle else. To confess that I lack patience for minutiae and the longhaul is to invite dismissal as a dilettante. Dilettante in the sense ofsomeone who takes delight in the world, yes, I admit to fitting thedescription. But I like to claim, or rather confess to, something else,namely, a yearning for the sudden illumination-an excuse to shout"Eureka!"-that is perhaps more common among physical scien-tists, artists, and essayists than among humanist scholars. Be that asit may, just as I was about to give up my project on specialized roomsand individuality, it suddenly occurred to me that the story could be

given a thicker texture and far greater resonance by having it placedbetween two other narratives-one on food and eating, the otheron the theater.

The medieval manor house was little more than the center-piece-the hall, an unsegmented area in which all sorts of activitiestook place. Food eaten there, too, was either a whole animal, a heftyshank, or a stew of many ingredients thrown together with littleconsideration for compatibility. Life in the Middle Ages was publicand gregarious. Food was eaten heartily; table manners wereminimal. People had few places to which they could withdraw andthey did not seem to mind. There was a strong sense of self, but littleself-consciousness. Obviously I cannot trace the delicately interwo-ven stories of house, food, and table manners here. But the essenceof what I am getting at is clear enough. By late nineteenth century,the great European house had probably reached a maximum degreeof partitioning and specialization. A room existed for every pur-pose-including that of being alone with one's books and thoughts.Dining reached new heights of refinement, not so much in flavor asin the quality and number of utensils. Meat in vulgar bulk, exceptfor the roast in England, was banished from the table. Foods wereserved separately, not indiscriminately mixed as in the Middle Agesand even in the seventeenth century. To proper Victorians, diningwas a ritual at which drinking a wine inappropriate to the meat, orconfusing the fish knife with the butter knife, was an embarrassingbreach of etiquette. Whereas in earlier times guests shared a benchat the dining table, now each guest was ensconced in his own chairand had before him his own private world of sparkling glasses andsilverware. He was expected to eat as if nothing so gross asnourishment had crossed his mind, and as if the real purpose forsitting down to table was to engage in polite conversation with hischarming neighbors.

More exciting and potentially more revealing than the story offood and eating is the story of the theater. Social scientists seekmodels of society, and yet have curiously neglected the theater asmodel. The theater is a model both in its socio-spatial organizationand in the plays enacted on its stage. Again, I am able to offer onlya few pointers in this talk. As physical space, the medieval theaterwas, like the Church building, a cosmos, embracing heaven, earth,and underworld. In the market square where plays were periodi-cally performed, actors and spectators freely intermingled; no

proscenium arch and curtain, no lighted stage and darkened hall (allmuch later inventions) separated them. The sort of promiscuousmixing I noted in the medieval hall and in medieval cooking wasalso a feature of the medieval theater. As for the play's theme, whatcould it be other than the salvation of man? Plays were moralityplays. Even those of a much later time-Shakespeare's, for ex-ample-might still be considered morality plays, with the scope andtrappings of the medieval worldview still lingering about them, ifonly because of their cosmic resonance and religious underpinning,and their performance in an all-embracing space called the Globe.How strikingly different the theater became in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries when, rather than the cosmos, there waslandscape, a much more subjective concept, and the human dramaof cues and miscues, failed communication and loneliness, eventu-ally moved to interior space-the living room. Late nineteenth-century plays that depict individual separateness within rooted,communal life find a parallel in the theater's own physical arrange-ment-its compartmentalized spaces. Actors and spectators do notmix. The sense of one world-the Globe-is missing. On the oneside is the illuminated stage, on the other, the darkened hall in whichspectators sit in their separate chairs, as if alone.

My second example of a psychological reward-an unexpectedinsight that made for a period of personal satisfaction, if little else-is illustrated by the book Dominance and Affection: The Making ofPets. This may seem an unlikely work for a geographer, yet Iconsider it mainstream geography, though mainstream "with atwist." And what is the twist? To answer that question, I must firstsay something about the mainstream. There are, in fact, severalmainstreams, several historically rooted, generally accepted ap-proaches to geography, one of which is studying how humans havetransformed the earth. This particular approach received a majorimpetus in 1955, when three distinguished scholars, Carl Sauer,Marston Bates, and Lewis Mumford, organized an internationalsymposium to demonstrate its fruitfulness, and a further impetuswhen the different interpretations were published in a much-acclaimed volume called Man's Role in Changing the Face of theEarth. I was a student at Berkeley in the early fifties, which were also

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Carl Sauer's last years before retirement. I could sense the excite-ment-the importance of what was going on. Since the sixties, thisflurry of excitement on university campuses has become the well-organized, sometimes well-financed, often passionate, global envi-ronmental movement. Publications quickly reached floodtide.Overwhelmingly they emphasized, as they still do, how humaneconomic activities, driven by necessity and even more by greed,have radically altered and all too often despoiled the earth.

Dominance and Affection is part of the mainstream insofar as it,too, can be taken as a study of how humans have transformed theearth. But, as the title indicates, the book's point of departure ispsychological rather than economic. My concern is more withhuman nature than with nature "out there." In the book, changes onthe earth's surface matter only to the degree that they shed light onthe sort of animal we are. One thing is clear: we are the sort of animalthat has amassed enormous power, which we have used for a largenumber of ends, among them to temper nature's harshness and tomake it produce food and other desirable commodities regularlyand abundantly. In advanced civilizations, this power has oftenbeen abused. Not only nature but also weaker peoples suffer as aresult. Economic exploitation is the name of the game.

The particular twist I introduce shifts attention away fromeconomic to aesthetic exploitation, which is the mistreatment ofnature, including human beings, for purposes of pleasure and art.I ask the reader to picture not cattle yoked to the plow or trees cutdown to make homes, but rather the laptop poodle, the pottedgarden, and the pampered human underlings of a potentate. In thelast set of examples, power is applied to create comeliness andbeauty, and with a certain affection for the manipulated objects.Hence, the book's title, which is dominance and affection, and thebook's subtitle, which is the making of pets. Power so used tendsto be regarded as benign, especially because it does not bring aboutmassive changes on the earth's surface or cause serious problemsof pollution. I cast a shadow on this attractive picture by saying thatpower can be even more uninhibited, more arbitrary and cruel,when it is playful. "Play" is such a sunny word that we forget its darkside. It is bad to be "used," but it can be worse to be "played with."Economic exploitation has a limited end, the efficient attainment ofwhich calls for an awareness of the nature of the thing to bemanipulated and a deference to tried-and-true rules of procedure.

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Play, by contrast, is open-ended and freely experimental. Themanner of play is not guided by anything other than the manipulator'sfantasy and will.

In my book, the first pet I introduce is water. It may seem poeticlicense to call water a pet, for a pet is normally thought of as animate,whereas water is not an organism. Yet, in the imagination, water isalmost universally considered "alive." This moving and living forceis harnessed for many economic ends, but it is also a plaything. Wetrain it, we force it to act against its nature for our amusement,captivatingly, as fountains that leap and impart an air of spontaneousjoy to the garden. There is nothing spontaneous about fountains,however, which rather are clear examples of submission to power.Their existence requires channeling water from distant sourcesthrough canals, tunnels, and aqueducts-a complex organization inwhich managers, engineers, skilled workers, and a large labor forcemust effectively cooperate. Moreover, the choreography of sprout-ing water depends on the development of a sophisticated hydraulicscience. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, fountainswere among the most showy pets of European princes.

Following this excursus into the playful use of water, I move onto the "petification" of plants and animals, and, in the process,tread-perhaps rather heavy-footedly-on the idea that the great oraesthetic garden can be considered as belonging to the sphere ofnature and innocence. Backyard gardens might be so categorized,but not the princely garden, which is as artificial and artifactual asthe palatial house to which it is attached. Indeed, my favorite imageof the human domination of nature in pre-industrial times is notmonumental architecture, but rather the diminutive garden, knownas penjing in Chinese and bonsai in Japanese. The bonsai iswilderness reduced to potted landscape, domesticated in the literalsense, and by exquisite means of torture ("torture" in the literal senseof twisting and bending) sustained with loving attention to detailover an extended period of time.

I have used the two books Segmented Worlds and Self andDominance and Affection to show how a slightly different angle ofvision can impart a fresh glow to even the most familiar themes.Being able to come up with a different angle is the sweetener that

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has motivated me throughout a career of four decades. But thesesweeteners, though necessary, are not sufficient. The deepermotivation is the quest for meaning that I evoked earlier: the questfor the meaning of life. I am the sort of person who cannot abandonsuch a quest without also saying quits to life.

What have I discovered about the world that is, equally, self-discovery? As I look over my books, I am struck by their binary titlesand themes: topophilia and topophobia, space and place, commu-nity and self, dominance and affection, cosmos and hearth. I usedto think that I had treated the two poles of each binary evenhand-edly, but this I eventually realized was naive. In the book, Cosmosand Hearth, I openly acknowledged my bias in the subtitle, whichis A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint. Hearth I love. Who doesn't? Hearthstands for home, community, familiar customs-stability. Cosmos,by contrast, stands for world, society, human achievements andaspirations touched by the strange and the unpredictable. Mypredilection is for the latter and, in particular, for the latter as goal:one starts from hearth and moves toward cosmos. This trajectoryseems to me entirely natural, but it may also be that I am disposedtoward it as a consequence of certain experiences in childhood.Bear with me therefore if I add here an autobiographical note.

Born in China, I left with my family at age ten for Australia. I havebeen rootless-on the whole happily rootless--ever since. Mychildhood in China corresponded to the period of war with Japan.We were constantly on the road, escaping from the invading army.We eventually settled in the wartime capital of Chongqing. Theeconomy had broken down. We barely had enough to eat. Theelementary school I attended was a single, ill-equipped room. Yet,astonishingly, we were given a thoughtfully packaged, cosmopoli-tan education. We read elevating stories from the Chinese, Euro-pean, and American pasts, stories about great scientists andinventors such as Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, and BenjaminFranklin that were meant to stimulate our intellectual ambition, andmoral tales (ones of filial piety, naturally, but also Oscar Wilde's "TheHappy Prince") intended to help us grow into compassionate adults.

Although I loved school, I was wary of the daily trek that took methere, for in our path was a village, through which a funeralprocession passed from time to time. How clearly I remember evennow the procession's centerpiece, the corpse. It was wrapped in abamboo sheet, on top of which was tied a rooster, which served as

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an advance warning system to the carriers and mourners, for itwould crow if the corpse stirred. I both dreaded and hated thefuneral procession, which I came to identify with traditional cultureand hearth, drenched in fear and superstition, compared with whichschool was liberation-a sunny world where we learned about aman who sought to bring down electricity with a kite, and wherewe were inspired by a code of behavior (as in "The Happy Prince")that in its idealism went far beyond filial piety and kinshipobligation.

Thus, early in life, in the midst of war and poverty, I had a tasteof the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, culled from differentcivilizations. It excited in me a yearning for the great triad, especiallyfor the Good, that has lasted into old age. I began the search for whatgood means to different peoples in the facts of human geography.Good, I was to find out, means at bottom nurturance and stability.Nature provides nurturance, though rather meagerly; and it providesstability, though not one that is utterly reliable. Culture is howhumans, by imagination and skill, escape into more predictable,responsive, and flattering worlds of their own making. These worldsare immensely varied. On the material plane, they range from grasshut to skyscraper, village to metropolis; on the mental plane, frommagical beliefs to great systems of religion and metaphysics. Theyare all, in different ways, aspirations to the Good.

Three intractable problems arise out of this human venture,darkening it. One is violence and destructiveness. On a materialplane, nothing is ever built without prior destruction-a fact toosoon forgotten since the new is tangible presence whereas thedestroyed is at best memory. The second problem is that the abilityto destroy and build presupposes power, and power is morallysuspect and can all too easily become monstrous. Historically,construction on any scale was possible only because the eliteexercised control over the sinews of laborers and draft animals.Civilization could not come into existence without rather rigidchains of command and obedience-without, that is, social inequal-ity, a condition that had cast a long shadow over civilized life evenas it strove to diminish its worst effects. The third problem derivesfrom the feeling that even if we put aside violence and the abusesof power, and just look at our accomplishments, our works, whatdo we find? Wonders galore, but many of these can seem curiouslyunreal-aeries that have risen too far above the ground of common

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sense and ordinary experience. They amaze and entertain, they aresources of great prestige, but they do not satisfy deep humanlongings for ... for what? The short answer is, for the Real and theGood. But what is real? More answerably, what do people meanwhen they say "real"? And what is its relation to the Good?

I am now at a stage in life when some sort of accounting seemsappropriate. Have I done the best I can with my talent and with theopportunities that have come my way? What have I learned? Am Iwiser or happier for it? Predictably, my answers to these questionsare ambivalent. In the case of talent, I am told that we use only aboutten percent of what we are given. In biblical language, we bury ourtalent; we are unproductive servants. But I cannot believe this to betrue of me. I have used whatever I was born with to the full. "Whatyou see is all there is," I say to friends who encourage me by hintingthat I, like most people, have seeds of creativity as yet undeveloped.It must be extremely frustrating to have talents that fail to come tofruition for lack of opportunity. But that has not been my fate. Mineis the humbling one of knowing that I have only a small talent tobegin with, and that its full flowering under even excellentconditions has produced only a very modest bouquet.

Still, however meager the result, how can I not be grateful for theopportunities that the profession of geography has provided?Geography has allowed me to roam from the physical to thehuman-from climate and landforms to morals and ethics-and stillremain within its capacious borders. The downside is isolation-isolation from fellow geographers who may roam the same groundsbut come up with quite different questions and answers; andisolation from scholars in philosophical disciplines who, thoughthey may share my questions, find no reason to heed the cogitationsof an outsider. But how can it be otherwise? Even at a cocktail party,it is not easy to break into the conversation of people who alreadyknow one another well. How immeasurably more difficult, then, itis to break into the conversation of a long line of philosophers inapostolic succession that began with Plato.

Isolation is a subterranean motif of my life as an academic. It didnot start that way, for I was once a student of landforms-a specialiston the pediments and arroyas of the American Southwest. I have

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wondered what life would be like if I had remained in that field,cultivating it side by side with fellow geomorphologists. Howwarmly communal it would have been, even in the midst ofarguments and debates! If, as such a specialist, I gave the HaskinsLecture, I would be able to acknowledge my indebtedness toesteemed predecessors and fellow workers. I would have thesatisfaction of seeing myself adding my tiny sheaf to the abundantharvest of geomorphological knowledge. But I chose otherwise. Forall the excitement and satisfaction of that choice, it has distinctdisadvantages, not the least of which is the appearance of egotism.For what is a maverick scholar but one who cannot readily name hisforebears? Of course he has them, and they are a multitude, but theytend to be individuals from different fields unknown to one anotherrather than conversing members of a single discipline and estab-lished tradition.

As I enter my crepuscular years, I wonder about Socrates's famousdictum, "the unexamined life is not worth living." A scholar certainlyexamines. But what he or she examines is other people's lives-theworld "out there," not his or her own life. I can devote an entirecareer studying desert landforms or traffic flows in congested citieswithout reflecting on who I am and what I have made of myexistence. Indeed, paying attention to the world may be a way ofescaping from the intractable dilemmas of selfhood. While this is aplausible outlook, it is also a central tenet of postmodernist thoughtthat any serious and prolonged intellectual engagement with theworld transmutes into a marriage of self and the other-so that, aswith old married couples, the two may even begin to look alike. Myown type of work, ostensibly about "people and environment,"draws so much on the sort of person I am that I have wonderedwhether I have not written an unconscionably long autobiography.By tiny unmarked steps, examination turns into self-examination. Isit worth doing? Will it lead one to the good life? Or will it, as SaulBellow believes, make one wish one were dead? I oscillate betweenthe two possibilities. In the end, I come down on the side of Socrates,if only because the unexamined life is as prone to despair as theexamined one; and if despair-occasional despair-is human, Iwould prefer to confront it with my eyes open, even convert it intospectacle, than submit to it blindly as though it were implacable fate.

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ACLS Occasional Papers

1. A Life of Learning (1987 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)by Carl E. Schorske

2. Perplexing Dreams: Is There a Core Tradition in the Humanities?by Roger Shattuck

3. R.M. Lumiansky.: Scholar, Teacher, Spokesman for the Humanities4. A Life of Learning (1988 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)

by John Hope Franklin5. Learned Societies and the Evolution of the Disciplines by Saul B.

Cohen, David Bromwich, and George W. Stocking, Jr.6. The Humanities in the University: Strategies for the 1990's by

W.R. Connor et al.7. Speaking for the Humanities by George Levine et al.8. The Agenda for the Humanities and Higher Education for the

21st Century by Stephen Graubard9. A Life of Learning (1989 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)

by Judith N. Shklar10. Viewpoints. Excerpts from the ACLS Conference on The

Humanities in the 1990's by Peter Conn et al.11. National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities12. A Life of Learning (1990 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)

by Paul Oskar Kristeller13. The ACLS Comparative Constitutionalism Project: Final Report14. Scholars and Research Libraries in the 21st Century15. Culture's New Frontier. Staking a Common Ground by Naomi

F. Collins16. The Improvement of Teaching by Derek Bok; responses by

Sylvia Grider, Francis Oakley, and George Rupp17. A Life of Learning (1991 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)

by Milton Babbitt18. Fellowships in the Humanities, 1983-1991 by Douglas Greenberg19. A Life of Learning (1992 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)

by D.W. Meinig20. The Humanities in the Schools21. A Life of Learning (1993 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)

by Annemarie Schimmel22. The Limits of Expression in American Intellectual Life by

Kathryn Abrams et al.23. Teaching the Humanities: Essays from the ACLS Elementary and

Secondary Schools Teacher Curriculum Development Project

24. Perspectives on the Humanities and School-Based CurriculumDevelopment by Sandra Blackman et al.

25. A Life of Learning (1994 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)by Robert K. Merton

26. Changes in the Context for Creating Knowledge by GeorgeKeller, Dennis O'Brien, and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph

27. Rethinking Literary History-Comparatively by Mario J. Valdesand Linda Hutcheon

28. The Internationalization of Scholarship and Scholarly Societies29. Poetry In and Out of the Classroom: Essays from the ACLS

Elementary and Secondary Schools Teacher CurriculumDevelopment Project

30. A Life of Learning (1995 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)by Phyllis Pray Bober

31. Beyond the Academy: A Scholar's Obligations by George R.Garrison et al.

32. Scholarship and Teaching: A Matter of Mutual Supportby Francis Oakley

33. The Professional Evaluation of Teaching by James England,Pat Hutchings, and Wilbert J. McKeachie

34. A Life of Learning (1996 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)by Robert William Fogel

35. Collaborative Historiography: A Comparative Literary Historyof Latin America by Linda Hutcheon, Djelal Kadir, andMario J. Valdes

36. New Connections for Scholars: The Changing Missions of aLearned Society in an Era of Digital Networks by Douglas C.Bennett

37. Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship: Achieve-ments, Prospects, and Challenges-The United States Focusby Pamela Pavliscak, Seamus Ross, and Charles Henry

38. Report of the President, 1986-1997by Stanley N. Katz39. A Life of Learning (1997 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)

by Natalie Zemon Davis40. The Transformation of Humanistic Studies in the Twenty-first

Century: Opportunities and Perils by Thomas Bender, StanleyChodorow, and Pauline Yu

41. Computing in the Humanities: Summary of a Roundtable Meeting42. A Life of Learning (1998 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture)

by Yi-Fu Tuan